The HTC Desire 610 offers a modern Android experience for little cash, but you get what you pay for in the form of disappointing display quality.

With HTC's ill-fated strategy of slimming down its smartphonelineup now a distant memory, the Taiwanese company is back to trotting out a lineup of low and midrange devices to compete with the manufacturing might of Samsung and LG. The HTC Desire 610 fills the low end of the portfolio, coming in at just 99 cents (with two-year contract) on AT&T. It's a decent starter phone that draws elements from HTC's One line, but shortcomings like a lackluster display and oversized bezels put it in inexpensive knockoff territory. A recent price drop to $0.99 for the vastly superior Amazon Fire Phone makes it all the more difficult for the Desire 610 to stand out. If you're looking for something a bit bigger, the $49.99 LG G Vista offers a nice phablet experience on a budget.

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Design, Features, and Call QualityWith rounded edges and a glossy back, the Desire 610 bears resemblance to the iPhone 5c, while the front-facing speakers and oversized bezels are a nod to the original HTC One. It's an absolute grease and fingerprint magnet, but that's typical of glossy designs. At 5.63 by 2.78 by 0.38 inches (HWD) and 5.04 ounces, the 610 feels too big for its 4.7-inch display—there's about an inch of bezel and plastic framing the top and bottom of the display, not to mention healthy bezels to the left and right. The Power button is also frustratingly on the top edge of the overly tall phone, and both it and the Volume buttons feel too mushy. A flap on the left covers the microSD and SIM card slots, while a micro USB port sits on the bottom edge.

The 4.7-inch, 960-by-540-pixel LCD is a big letdown, especially in light of HTC's typically excellent displays. It's not just the low pixel density (234ppi) either—look slightly off angle and everything begins to either wash out or darken. It's nearly impossible to see even lighting and accurate colors thanks to the atrocious viewing angle here. Contrast also suffers, while maximum brightness leaves a lot to be desired.

HTC's front-facing BoomSound speakers are still pretty solid here, but they don't quite replicate the relative richness you get with the One (M8) or even the larger Desire 816's speakers. They're good by virtue of their position more than anything.

The Desire 610 connects to AT&T's GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz), UMTS (850/1900/2100MHz), HSPA+ (850/1900/2100MHz), and LTE (Band 2, 4, 5, and 17) networks. Reception and download speeds are in line with what we've come to expect from AT&T's LTE network. Call quality was comparable with the Desire 816, meaning loud volume in the earpiece, but less-than-stellar transmissions through the mic. Voices on the other end of the line were clear and distinct, but my voice sounded a touch muddy. Noise cancellation is about average, struggling with wind buffeting and louder disturbances, but doing a decent job of dampening persistent background noise like the clicking of mechanical keyboards.

The Desire 610 only supports 802.11b/g/n networks on the crowded, slower 2.4GHz band, which is a bummer. Also onboard are Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, and NFC radios, all of which worked fine in my tests.

Performance and AndroidInside the Desire 610 is a quad-core, 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC with 1GB RAM. It's the same chip powering the vast majority of entry-level and midrange Android smartphones today. Performance is in line with phones like the LG Lucid 3, delivering generally smooth performance for most basic tasks like Web browsing, but choking under heavier loads like graphically intensive games.

HTC's slimmed-down Sense 6 skin is here, running atop Android 4.4.2. It's more or less identical to what we saw on the Desire 816, complete with BlinkFeed, Zoe, and HTC's custom camera, gallery, and music apps. One notable useful feature that trickles down from the One (M8) is Extreme Power Saving Mode, which pares down connectivity and functionality to core apps to save battery life.

Of the 8GB of internal storage, 3.37GB is available to users out of the box. Our 64GB microSD card worked for expanding storage, but you can't easily move app data to the memory card. Bloatware is a way of life for AT&T devices, and the situation is no different on the Desire 610. Preloads include apps like AT&T Navigator, Wild Tangent Games, and Yellow Pages, all of which are basically useless.

In a battery rundown test, where we loop a video with Wi-Fi on and screen brightness set to max, the Desire 610 lasted for 7 hours, 31 minutes. That's right in line with the 7 hours, 34 minutes turned in by the Desire 816, which has a larger battery, but also a larger, higher-resolution display.

Cameras and ConclusionsThere's an 8-megapixel, rear-facing camera and 1.3-megapixel, front-facing camera, neither of which take very good photos. The rear shooter struggles to capture fine details or nail an accurate exposure, skewing towards overexposed even in good lighting. Image noise crops up in moderate-to-low lighting scenarios, causing graininess and even more smudged details. Focus was also routinely soft in my tests, especially towards the edges of the frame, suggesting a low quality lens. Video resolution tops out at 1080p and footage shot outdoors in good light looks fine, but frame rates drop to the low 20's indoors and graininess becomes a big issue.

The HTC Desire 610 is one of the most affordable, modern Android smartphones on AT&T at the moment. It offers good performance for the price and has some useful features that aren't a given in the budget realm, like nice front-facing speakers and up-to-date Android software. That said, there are some shortcomings here worth mentioning, most notably a painfully low-quality display. Right now you can get the Amazon Fire Phone for the same 99 cents—it's not perfect by any means, and not really a true Android phone, but it's supremely well built and a significantly nicer device than the Desire 610. And if you're not tied to any ecosystem, AT&T is also offering the Apple iPhone 5c for free on contract, which delivers a far more polished software experience with appreciably better hardware.

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About the Author

Before joining the consumer electronics team at PCMag, Eugene worked at local news station NY1 doing everything from camera work to writing scripts. He grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and graduated from the University of Virginia in 2010. Outside of work Eugene enjoys TV, loud music, and making generally healthy and responsible life choices.

HTC Desire 610 (AT&T)

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